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Shocking new revelations come as activists prepare to sue the U.S. military for unlawful spying

By Sarah Lazare

Anti-war activists who were infiltrated and spied on by the military for years have now been placed on the domestic terrorist list, they announced Monday. The shocking revelation comes as the activists prepare to sue the U.S. military for unlawful spying.”The fact that a peaceful activist such as myself is on this domestic terrorist list should be cause for concern for other people in the US,” declared Brendan Maslauskas Dunn, plaintiff in the lawsuit. “We’ve seen an increase in the buildup of a mass surveillance state under the Obama and Bush Administrations.”The discovery is the latest development in a stunning saga that exposes vast post-9/11 spying networks in which military, police, and federal agencies appear to be in cahoots.Documents declassified in 2009 reveal that military informant John Towery, going by the name ‘John Jacob,’ spent over two years infiltrating and spying on Olympia, Washington anti-war and social justice groups, including Port Militarization Resistance, Students for a Democratic Society, the Industrial Workers of the World, and Iraq Veterans Against the War.

Towery admitted to the spying and revealed that he shared information with not only the military, but also the police and federal agencies. He claimed that he was not the only spy.

The activists, who blast the snooping as a violation of their First and Fourth Amendment rights, levied a lawsuit against the military in 2009.

“The spying resulted in plaintiffs and others being targeted for repeated harassment, preemptive and false arrest, excessive use of force, and malicious prosecution,” reads a statement by the plaintiffs.

The Obama Administration attempted to throw out the litigation, but in December 2012 the 9th Circuit Court ruled that the case could continue.

When the plaintiffs were preparing their deposition for the courts two weeks ago, they were shocked to discover that several Olympia anti-war activists were listed on the domestic terrorist list, including at least two plaintiffs in the case.

The revelations prompted them to amend their lawsuit to include charges that the nonviolent activists were unlawfully targeted as domestic terrorists.

“The breadth and intensity of the spying by U.S. Army officials and other law enforcement agents is staggering,” said Larry Hildes, National Lawyers Guild attorney who filed the lawsuit in 2009. “If nonviolent protest is now labeled and treated as terrorism, then democracy and the First Amendment are in critical danger.”

“I think that there is a huge potential for the case to set precedent,” declared plaintiff Julianne Panagacos. “This could have a big impact on how the U.S. military and police are able to work together.”

Well they are not alone seems the EU is not pleased with US spying either.

June 30 2013

The president of the European parliament has demanded an explanation from US authorities over the latest revelation that EU diplomatic missions in Washington, New York and Brussels were under electronic surveillance from the NSA.

“I am deeply worried and shocked about the allegations of US authorities spying on EU offices,” said the President of the European Parliament Martin Schulz. “If the allegations prove to be true, it would be an extremely serious matter which will have a severe impact on EU-US relations.”

“On behalf of the European Parliament, I demand full clarification and require further information speedily from the US authorities with regard to these allegations,” he added.

EU commissioner for justice, Viviane Reding, said the Union has contacted the US authorities in Washington and Brussels about a report in Der Spiegel magazine.

“We have immediately been in contact with the US authorities in Washington DC and in Brussels and have confronted them with the press reports,” she said in a statement. “They have told us they are checking on the accuracy of the information released yesterday and will come back to us.”

“Partners do not spy on each other,” Reding, suggesting that talks for a free trade agreement between the EU and the US should be halted until Washington provides explanations.

“We cannot negotiate over a big transatlantic market if there is the slightest doubt that our partners are carrying out spying activities on the offices of our negotiators,” she said.

“The spying has taken on dimensions that I would never have thought possible from a democratic state,” he told Der Spiegel. “How should we still negotiate if we must fear that our negotiating position is being listened to beforehand?”

Germany and France want answers

Meanwhile, Germany’s justice minister also called for an immediate explanation from the United States saying the news that Washington bugged European Union offices was “reminiscent of the Cold War.”

“It must ultimately be immediately and extensively explained by the American side whether media reports about completely disproportionate tapping measures by the US in the EU are accurate or not,” Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger said in a statement.

It was also revealed on Sunday that the extent of NSA’s spying on Germany was bigger that previously thought as the US combed through half a billion German phone calls, emails and text messages every month.

France also wants Washington to clarify their intentions after the news that the NSA put EU offices under electronic surveillance.

“France has today asked the American authorities for an explanation,” Laurent Fabius, French foreign minister, said in a statement. “These acts, if confirmed, would be completely unacceptable.”

“We expect the American authorities to answer the legitimate concerns raised by these press revelations as quickly as possible,” he added.

A spokesman for the Office of the US Director of National Intelligence had no comment on the Der Spiegel story, Reuters reported.

Der Spiegel, quoting from a September 2010 “top secret” US National Security Agency (NSA) document leaked by former CIA employee Edward Snowden, reported on Saturday the NSA was eavesdropping on the EU’s internal computer networks in Washington, as well as at the 28-member bloc UN office in New York.

The German magazine also reported that five years ago, the NSA also targeted telecommunications at the Justus Lipsius building in Brussels, home to the European Council, where all EU member states have their offices.

Snowden, 30, fled the US for Hong Kong in May, just weeks before The Guardian and Washington Post published details he provided about a top-secret US government surveillance program that accumulated internet and telephone traffic both at home and abroad.

The whistleblower is presently in the transit zone of Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport, where it is believed he is attempting to gain political asylum in Ecuador.

Lode Vanoost, former deputy speaker of the Belgian parliament, believes that the main purpose of the US surveillance program was “economic spying” on the EU.
“At the moment, the EU is negotiating a new free trade agreement with the United States,” the former deputy speaker noted. “Well, [now the US can gather] what their opponent is already discussing internally of strategy. That is one of the possibilities.”

Vanoost also believes that part of the reason for the spying was due to the decline in US economic strength.

“On the economic level, [the US] is losing ground everywhere,” he said. “Look at what the BRIC countries are doing. The EU is having stronger ties with Russia, with Africa, with Latin America. And the US doesn’t seem to get its economic priorities imposed as it used to. So what I see is a big risk for economic spying.”

He added that there is “too much at stake” for there to be a total breakdown in US-EU bilateral relations, however, “behind closed doors there will be some very tough words” exchanged between EU and American officials. Source

Much of that information gathered, is also in the hands of privatized entities. To make it even more discussing. Some of those private companies are not even American, but are from other countries. So privately owned, foreign companies, have your information.

DID YOU KNOW?: Two Secretive Israeli Companies Reportedly Bugged The US Telecommunications Grid For The NSA

By doing so, this would imply, companies like Facebook and Google don’t have to explicitly provide the NSA with access to their servers because major Internet Service Providers (ISPs) such as AT&T and Verizon already allows the U.S. signals intelligence agency to eavesdrop on all of their data anyway.

Narus’ product, the Semantic Traffic Analyzer, is a software application that runs on standard IBM or Dell servers using the Linux operating system. It’s renowned within certain circles for its ability to inspect traffic in real time on high-bandwidth pipes, identifying packets of interest as they race by at up to 10 Gbps.

“*Anything that comes through (an internet protocol network), we can record,” Steve Bannerman, marketing vice president of Narus, a Mountain View, California company, said. “We can reconstruct all of their e-mails along with attachments, see what web pages they clicked on, we can reconstruct their (voice over internet protocol) calls.”

With a telecom wiretap the NSA only needs companies like Microsoft, Google, and Apple to passively participate while the agency to intercepts, stores, and analyzes their communication data. The indirect nature of the agreement would provide tech giants with plausible deniability.

And having a foreign contractor bug the telecom grid would mean that the NSA gained access to most of the domestic traffic flowing through the U.S. without technically doing it themselves.

This would provide the NSA, whose official mission is to spy on foreign communications, with plausible deniability regarding domestic snooping.

“Cautious estimates indicate that in the past few years… Unit 8200 veterans have set up some 30 to 40 high-tech companies, including 5 to 10 that were floated on Wall Street.” Referred to only as “Brigadier General B,” he added, “This correlation between serving in the intelligence Unit 8200 and starting successful high-tech companies is not coincidental: Many of the technologies in use around the world and developed in Israel were originally military technologies and were developed and improved by Unit veterans.”

The NSA began eavesdropping on the international communications of Americans after President Bush secretly authorized the practice in 2002 — without the court-approved warrants ordinarily required for domestic spying — to search for evidence of terrorist activity.

As part of the program approved by President Bush for domestic surveillance without warrants, the N.S.A. has gained the cooperation of American telecommunications companies to obtain backdoor access to streams of domestic and international communications, the officials said.

Last year the ACLU published this infographic, which is the best way to visualize what bugging the telecommunications grid provides the NSA:

The Israeli Criminals Behind the NSA Spy Scandal

By Christopher Bollyn

http://www.bollyn.com/June 13, 2013At the center of the NSA scandal is a gang of Israeli high-tech criminals which is connected to the false-flag terror attacks of 9-11. These connections underline the involvement of the same Israeli criminals to both 9-11 and the NSA’s secret program to collect and store our personal information and conversations, which came about mainly as a consequence of 9-11.Two Israeli companies, Narus and Verint, are involved in the National Security Agency (NSA) spy scandal in which copies of our phone calls and email data are sent to secret rooms at NSA buildings across the country. These Israeli companies are closely connected to Unit 8200, the electronic espionage unit of the Israeli military. (Narus was acquired by Boeing in 2010.)

The founder and former chairman of Verint is wanted by the FBI for a long list of crimes. He is veteran Israeli intelligence officer.

Jacob “Kobi” Alexander, the former head of Comverse, the parent company of Verint, is a wanted criminal who has fled U.S. justice to Africa and probably subsequently to Israel. It is important to note that Kobi Alexander and Comverse were closely connected to Odigo, the Israeli messaging system that was used to warn Israelis to stay away from the World Trade Center on 9-11.

Furthermore, the NSA has used Israeli encryption software from RSA Security, Inc. since 2006, which means that Israelis hold the encryption keys to the entire NSA computer network. The Israelis obviously have easy access to everything at the NSA.

The following video clip is of James Bamford discussing the two Israeli companies, Narus and Verint, who are involved in the massive collection of our telephone and Internet data. Bamford was on “Democracy Now!” on October 14, 2008, discussing the role of these Israeli companies, who are closely tied to Israeli intelligence.

To have access to personal phone calls and emails allows Israeli intelligence to blackmail and control people, like General David Petraeus, who was forced to resign from his position as director of the C.I.A. after an extra-marital affair was revealed by unknown agents who had access to his personal email.

Bamford wrote an article entitled “Shady Companies With Ties to Israel Wiretap the U.S. for the NSA” for Wired.com in April 2012 in which he discussed the Israeli companies and the criminals who ran them:

In addition to constructing the Stellar Wind center, and then running the operation, secretive contractors with questionable histories and little oversight were also used to do the actual bugging of the entire U.S. telecommunications network.

According to a former Verizon employee briefed on the program, Verint, owned by Comverse Technology, taps the communication lines at Verizon, which I first reported in my book The Shadow Factory in 2008. Verint did not return a call seeking comment, while Verizon said it does not comment on such matters.

At AT&T the wiretapping rooms are powered by software and hardware from Narus, now owned by Boeing, a discovery made by AT&T whistleblower Mark Klein in 2004. Narus did not return a call seeking comment.

What is especially troubling is that both companies have had extensive ties to Israel, as well as links to that country’s intelligence service, a country with a long and aggressive history of spying on the U.S.

In fact, according to Binney, the advanced analytical and data mining software the NSA had developed for both its worldwide and international eavesdropping operations was secretly passed to Israel by a mid-level employee, apparently with close connections to the country. The employee, a technical director in the Operations Directorate, “who was a very strong supporter of Israel,” said Binney, “gave, unbeknownst to us, he gave the software that we had, doing these fast rates, to the Israelis.”

Several of the top people involved in these Israeli wiretapping companies are if fact criminals who are currently wanted for serious crimes committed in the United States, as Bamford explains in the 2012 article:

Like Narus, Verint was founded in Israel by Israelis, including Jacob “Kobi” Alexander, a former Israeli intelligence officer. Some 800 employees work for Verint, including 350 who are based in Israel, primarily working in research and development and operations, according to the Jerusalem Post. Among its products is STAR-GATE, which according to the company’s sales literature, lets “service providers … access communications on virtually any type of network, retain communication data for as long as required, and query and deliver content and data …” and was “[d]esigned to manage vast numbers of targets, concurrent sessions, call data records, and communications.”

In a rare and candid admission to Forbes, Retired Brig. Gen. Hanan Gefen, a former commander of the highly secret Unit 8200, Israel’s NSA, noted his former organization’s influence on Comverse, which owns Verint, as well as other Israeli companies that dominate the U.S. eavesdropping and surveillance market. “Take NICE, Comverse and Check Point for example, three of the largest high-tech companies, which were all directly influenced by 8200 technology,” said Gefen. “Check Point was founded by Unit alumni. Comverse’s main product, the Logger, is based on the Unit’s technology.”

According to a former chief of Unit 8200, both the veterans of the group and much of the high-tech intelligence equipment they developed are now employed in high-tech firms around the world. “Cautious estimates indicate that in the past few years,” he told a reporter for the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz in 2000, “Unit 8200 veterans have set up some 30 to 40 high-tech companies, including 5 to 10 that were floated on Wall Street.” Referred to only as “Brigadier General B,” he added, “This correlation between serving in the intelligence Unit 8200 and starting successful high-tech companies is not coincidental: Many of the technologies in use around the world and developed in Israel were originally military technologies and were developed and improved by Unit veterans.”

Equally troubling is the issue of corruption. Kobi Alexander, the founder and former chairman of Verint, is now a fugitive, wanted by the FBI on nearly three dozen charges of fraud, theft, lying, bribery, money laundering and other crimes. And two of his top associates at Comverse, Chief Financial Officer David Kreinberg and former General Counsel William F. Sorin, were also indicted in the scheme and later pleaded guilty, with both serving time in prison and paying millions of dollars in fines and penalties.

When asked about these contractors, the NSA declined to “verify the allegations made.”

The case of the Israeli criminal Kobi Alexander is like the proverbial “tip of the iceberg.” While Alexander’s crimes, through which he became immensely wealthy, are now evident, they are but a very small piece of a much larger Zionist criminal network – connected to the 9/11 terror attacks – which remains hidden beneath the surface.

Alexander, former head of the Israel-based Comverse Technology, was, until his crimes were discovered, one of the highest paid executives in the United States.

In the year 2000, for example, he reportedly earned some $102.5 million, with $93 million coming from the “exercise of options.” We now know that most of Alexander’s money was made through the fraudulent “exercise of options.”

Comverse Technology, the U.S.-based “parent company” of an older and much bigger Israel-based company with the same name, is the owner of the Verint, Ulticom, Starhome, Mercom and Startel companies. The key positions in these companies are all held by Israeli nationals.

Alexander, was recently allowed to flee the United States after he and two other former Comverse executives were charged with securities, mail and wire fraud by U.S. prosecutors in Brooklyn, New York. A warrant has been issued for his arrest…

While Alexander is obviously connected with Israel’s military intelligence apparatus and George Soros through the mutually owned investment fund ComSor, what is not widely reported is his company’s close links with Odigo, the Israeli-run instant messaging company that received – and conveyed – urgent warning messages about the imminent terror attacks on the World Trade Center, several hours before the first plane hit…

Shortly after 9-11, Odigo was completely taken over by Comverse Technology, which had been part owner of Odigo since early 2000, if not earlier. Shortly after 9/11, five executives from Comverse were reported to have profited by more than $267 million from “insider trading.”
Avner Ronen, the “founder” of Odigo, was Vice President of Business Development of Comverse Technology in October 2005. This indicates that Ronen and Alexander, both Israeli military officers with computer backgrounds, have been close business partners since early 2000. Source

Is it a good thing that, Snowden and others have blown the whistle?

The main questions we should all ask:

Do we all have the right to know that. our privacy has been illegally invaded by our own country or any foreign country?

Do we want our personal phone calls, e-mails etc in the hand of anyone let alone a private for profit company.

Would we want our information used to blackmail us or it could be used for identity theft, among other things?

Do you think anyone, who is against war should be deemed a is a terrorist?

Questions to ponder.

Added July 1 2013

US bugged dozens of foreign embassies

The US has been spying on dozens of foreign embassies and missions belonging to its rivals and allies in America to keep tabs on disagreements between them, new documents leaked by Edward Snowden revealed.

Elaborate means were used to install bugs and gather intelligence.

One document mentioned in the Guardian report on the leaks lists 38 foreign embassies and mission in US and describes them as “targets” under surveillance.

Targets in the September 2010 document included not only US rivals, but also American allies, such as EU mission in New York and its embassy in Washington, along with the French, Italian and Greek embassies, as well as Japan, Mexico, South Korea, India, Turkey and Middle Eastern countries. But the UK and Germany, along with some other European states were not mentioned.

US intelligence used a number of creative spying techniques, including bugging electronic communications equipment and tapping into cables to collect transmissions with specialized antennae.

One of the eavesdropping methods was codenamed “Dropmire” and involved putting a bug in an encrypted fax machine used at the EU embassy in Washington, DC, the Guardian quoted a 2007 document as saying. The fax machine was used to send cables to foreign affairs ministries in EU.

The US spied in order to gain insight into policy disagreements on global issues and other splits between member states, the leaked document revealed.

Codenames: ‘Perdido’, ‘Blackfoot’, ‘Wabash’ and ‘Powell’

US spy operations on dozens of foreign embassies and mission in US had a range of creative codenames.

An operation carried out in the EU mission at the UN and was called ‘Perdido’. It collected intelligence through implants or bugs that were placed inside electronic devices, along with targeted computers inside the mission copying everything saved on its hard drives.

The EU delegation on K Street in Washington was hit with three spy operations that targeted the embassy’s 90 staff. Two of them used electronic implants and the third used antennas to collect transmissions.

Codename ‘Blackfoot’ was used in an operation against the French mission to the UN and the name ‘Wabash’ referred to bugging the French embassy in Washington.

The Italian embassy in Washington was also targeted and codenamed as both ‘Bruneau’ and ‘Hemlock’.

Spying on the Greek UN mission was named ‘Powell’ and the operation against its embassy was known as ‘Klondyke’, documents revealed.

The operations are described as “close access domestic collection” and it remains unclear whether NSA solely carried its operations or in combination with FBI or CIA.

The new leak comes as European nations are already angry by what Snowden has revealed.

France and Germany have demanded the US account for leaked reports of massive-scale US spying on the EU. French President Francois Hollande called for an end to surveillance, while Germany said such “Cold War-style behavior” was “unacceptable.”

German publication Der Spiegel reported on Sunday that the US National Security Agency (NSA) had bugged EU offices in Brussels, New York and Washington.

Following the release of the report, the president of the EU parliament demanded an explanation from Washington, stressing that if the allegations were true there would be a significant backlash on US-EU relations.

Edward Snowden, a former CIA employee and ex-staff member of a private contractor working for the NSA, disclosed secret documents revealing US surveillance programs and British secret Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) sharing its intelligence with NSA, as part of the Tempora data collection project.

Snowden left the US for Hong Kong in May and currently remains in the transit area of Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport while Ecuador reviews his asylum request.

The US has charged Snowden with espionage and is trying to extradite him. Source